Te Soñé Primero

Amanita is pleased to present Te Soñé Primero, Mercedes Llanos’s first solo exhibition in New York. This new series of paintings and works on paper was produced during the artist’s pregnancy with her first child and throughout the postpartum period. During this transformative time, Llanos delved into dreaming as a medium for premonition and intuition. “I dreamt he was here in this world, and I discovered I was pregnant just a few days later.” Grappling with her inner world and the new life growing within her led Mercedes to evaluate new subject matter.

“The work I created during my pregnancy is very special. It marked the beginning of a change, a new sensitivity, and a different version of myself.”

Throughout her practice, Mercedes has explored the body both as an instrument and as a subject in her canvases. In this new series, this central theme is heightened by the conscious experience of her body’s transformation during pregnancy. Her engagement with large canvases becomes a confrontation with the solitude of painting and the profound connection of this unique relationship, much like the intimacy of pregnancy: “It’s the painting and then I—it’s us until it leaves the studio.” This physicality was both challenged and accentuated by this period, necessitating adjustments to her materials and process. “Painting became slower during pregnancy… Each piece took longer to complete, and some I finished after the baby was born.”

Color and texture are central to Mercedes’s oeuvre. Darker tones provide a fleshy backdrop to ethereal and fleeting scenes. The thin, translucent halos around both abstract and figurative forms evoke a sense of glow or even a pulse. In Sistema Solar, shapes drift within a solar system, gradually transmuting into a newborn, undergoing a process of cosmic gestation. As the silhouette realizes its figuration across the diptych, we witness the infant’s inaugural cries. In pieces like Mateo Mateo Mateo, she strips away color to focus on the raw, primordial texture achieved by scratching the canvas. This immediacy is also pertinent to her drawing practice, a medium she favors for recording her dreams and capturing them before they fade.

Archetypes, such as the Pietà, resonate throughout her work, emphasizing the sacred and universal bond between mother and child. In other pieces in the show, the art-historical archetype of the Odalisque is reimagined, in the company of the newborn resting above the mother’s chest. These figures are often set against shadowy, dusky backgrounds, which impart an iconographic quality to the corporeal subjects and simultaneously transform the works into landscapes of the unconscious; otherworldly qualities allude to the sacrality of birth and the arcane faculties that accompany a mother during pregnancy. Llanos boldly explores the intricate relationship between mother, creator, and painter, prophesying, "I dreamt you first."

— Isabella Tucci

Mercedes Llanos (b.1992, Mar del Plata, Argentina) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with an MFA from CUNY Hunter College in 2021 and is a grantee of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for figurative painting. Her works explores themes of the body and emotional changes, influenced by her personal experiences and relationships. Mercedes Llanos has exhibited at Balice Hertling, Paris; Lyles and King, New York; and the Vergez Collection, Buenos Aires, Argentina.